By Ben Ogorek
(This article was originally published at analyze stuff, and syndicated at StatsBlogs.)
Considering that Hollywood’s massive budgets provide access to the world’s finest writers, directors, and actors, how are movies ever bad?
Well, as we all know, they often are. But how could a Star Wars movie, in particular, be anything but great? Many reasons have been proposed for the perceived poor quality of the prequels, with George Lucas typically in the crosshairs. One theory is that Lucas had too much creative control, his ideas couldn’t be challenged, and a mediocre result was inevitable. JJ Abrams also has a lot of control over the new Star Wars; Rotten Tomatoes lists his roles as director, producer and screenwriter. Should we be worried?
In this article, we’ll use a statistical model to analyze movie directors and their involvement as screenwriters and producers of movies, and we’ll use that same model to predict the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer™ score for Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens. Truth be told, there will be more shooting from the hip than an actual Star Wars battle. There will be a lot of estimating, not a lot of focus on uncertainty, and hell, if we hit something, it’s probably because we got lucky. But to even take a stab at it, we’re going to need some data.
The data analyzed in this article consists of Rotten Tomatoes filmographies for 20 directors (well-known or behind recent hit movies) and a collective 207 movies rated “PG,” “PG-13,” or “R.” While the filmographies come from Rotten Tomatoes, the movie-level information comes from the Open Movie Database (OMDB). For information on data quality and completeness, as well as the R script that pulled the data, refer to the Appendix.
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Source:: statsblogs.com